218 Sing dawn - the songbirds of Abney Park nature reserve

The time has come for hot sun. Hot sun and basking. Hot sun and basking, and listening to crickets. And just sitting, amongst the crickets taking it all in.  This sound scene is of the landscape around Arley station in Shropshire. Under high trees in full leaf. Golden fields as far as the eye can see, glowing in the afternoon sun. Farmland gold. And farmland birds. Bobbing crows. Wood pigeons. And a buzzard. Distant farm machinery working the land.  Distant children playing beyond the station. Distant echoes, that roll across the horizon from a departed steam train that can be heard in episode 187. Down the field there's a man working. Hammer and nails. Knock knock knock. From post to post he goes. Slowly repairing the fence that runs between the hedgerow and the railway line. Knock knock knock. And a rest. And a glance up, at the circling buzzard. No rush. It's hot. There's all the time in the world for this. 

It is hard to believe this is North East London at dawn. And yet it is. 5am, last Wednesday. Day break, on the 1st of May. Misted air, barely a breeze. Verdantly breathable air, filtered and cleaned by the dense surrounding woodland. When at 8am the park gates are unlocked, the people will come to walk the winding paths. Bathe in the atmosphere created by the trees. And breathe the restorative, country clean air.  This is what a nature reserve within a city does. It purifies the air, not just for the lungs but for the ears. Layers upon layers of veteran trees soften the city rumble whilst providing a myriad of roosting spots for the songbirds to sing. And as they sing, their mellifluous sounds echo and reflect off all the boughs, branches, and countless leaves, to form an aural brilliance that is wonderful to behold.  But behold the brilliance we rarely do. Rarely can do. 5am is not when most of us are around or want to be around. And perhaps, for the sake of the birds and their own sense of freedom in the trees that are their home, that's not such a bad thing. 5am is, shall we all agree, their time of day. Their chance to be on their own amongst their own kind. Be themselves, and be in the world, in their own particular way. Capturing an hour of this world, as it happened, and on a day when the sky was relatively free of planes and the nearby roads relatively free of traffic and sirens, is what the Lento box was there to do. Here is that hour of time, heard from behind the gates of the newly restored chapel at the heart of Abney Park nature reserve.   Our special thanks to Abney Park for allowing us to capture the dawn chorus from the chapel. We recorded this episode exactly three years after our last recording just before the major restoration project started in the chapel. Listen to the dawn chorus from inside the chapel in 2021, in episode 68. And more episodes from around Abney Park here.  

In winter gales amongst moorland trees at night. Dark sky. Empty of everything, except for the invisible moving wind.    A moor slopes steep up to the right. And half a mile of grassland slopes gently away down the valley, to the left. At the bottom, is a reservoir, hidden behind more trees. This grassy spot along a high gritstone wall, near an old iron gate, looks from the lane like any overgrown corner of a Peak District field. But it isn't. It isn't just any spot. It is a seat in an amphitheatre of specially arranged wind catching trees.  Of course nobody actually set out to specially arrange these outcrops of trees like this so they'd create such a perfectly balanced and spatially panoramic scene in winter gales. They only catch the wind and turn its energy into deep and richly undulating sound because that's what trees do. But having left the Lento box in this spot to capture this long passage of time, it feels wonderful to have discovered that this exists. Here it is. And the performance? An hour of fresh moorland air. 

You're not alone here, in this seaside town. A place of hot pasties, hot cups of tea, and families on a day out. A place of rolling Atlantic waves. This is East Looe on the coast of Cornwall. Thick grey sky. April cold. A sprinkling of rain, But shut your eyes, and it could be summer.  Find a good spot on the sand. You may need to move once or twice. Be guided by your ears. Then chuck your rucksack down, lean against it with your umbrella angled so its just behind, and you'll have the perfect spot for an uninterrupted cinematic sound-view of the crashing waves. In all their crisp textural detail. And spatial glory. Can you hear which way the longshore drift goes? Maybe not yet. It can take a few minutes. While you wait notice how there's an interesting mix of garden birds and sea birds here. A mistle thrush far left, or is it a blackbird? A wren too, far right. Beyond where the little children are playing. The waves feel powerful in this spot on the sand. Powerful, Sometimes thunderous. Coming, and going, in long swaying rhythms. Coming, and going, with wide spacious calm inbetween. 

A fresh Cornish spring day last week, along the West Looe River valley. Hear an area of ancient woodland. Described as the lungs of Looe. It's Cornish rainforest. Trees, that go back in time, farther than we can imagine. Walk inland, with the river to your right. Soon it'll be endless oaks, trunks covered with moss, all around you. As far as the eye can see. Ahead, where the muddy footpath goes. And behind, from where you've come. From left high up the steep sided valley. All the way down to touch the clean span of tidal water, that glints peacefully between the line of smaller trees.  From high in the treetops above your head, the calls of rooks echo for half a mile or more. Birds sing crisp, and less harshly in these parts. They have no human noise to compete with. You can hear woodland birds, estuary birds, and sea birds all together here. Against a backdrop of beautiful, deep brown, undulating noise. Oak forest noise.  The subtle harmonious sound that steady sea air makes when it moves over oak does seem to us to have a deep and richly brown sound-feel. It's a sound that's so spatial. So invigorating to the senses. We believe it is one of the most valuable and important sensory ingredients, of what some call a forest bathing experience. We loved every moment of it, and of being within the true precious quiet of Kilminorth Woods. 

A birds ear view over Plymouth in the far south west of England. Plymouth in a fast gusting storm. Storm Kathleen. This is how it sounded from behind the huge plate glass window of a comfortable cushioned room on the fourth floor of a hotel the night before last. The hotel overlooks a district called The Hoe, where one of the original Eddystone Lighthouses now stands. We climbed Seaton's Tower just before making this recording. Inside the narrow corkscrew stairways, the rounded structure was rumbling loudly, like being inside a giant organ pipe. A few hours later, the wind was still fierce. Taken with the microphones on a tripod facing out a few inches away from the rain stippled glass (not at all how a sound recording is conventionally made) the air pressure was pressing so hard that whispering gusts were whistling and almost singing through the window seals, left and right. Somehow, though captured entirely from within the hotel room, the soundscape is wide and open. A blended scape, formed both from the interior cushioned acoustic of the hotel room and the wide open windswept city beyond.  Far right of scene, cars can be heard passing along a rain soaked road. Left of scene air whistles through the window seal. The calls of seagulls light up the spacious sky, flying despite the extreme conditions. The building rumbles subsonically. The sound of Plymouth, an exposed coastal city, in Storm Kathleen. It's a sound photograph that without the protection of the window, would not have been possible to make. 

Today marks four years of Radio Lento! We launched on 29 March 2020. Since then, a hundred and forty hours of material shared. Hundreds of thousands of ad-free and cost-free downloads. Long-form audio recordings. Of natural and empty places. In high precision spacious sound. Real aural essences of what it is to be present and immersed in a real place.  We've not missed a week since March 2020. Rural and country places. Coastal and tidal places. Edgelands. Brutal landscapes. Sonorous interior spaces. In wind and rain. Under the forces of nature. Broad daylight and the dead of night. We're interested not in any particular thing, but in the sound of every thing. In soundscapes that are most often not experienced. Because they seem empty. Places where nothing seems to be happening. Places filled with the delicate and the subtle. The soft, and the fragile. Aural environments that only through focusing over time, form in the mind's eye of the listener. Four years of producing Lento and we do still struggle to explain to people what Lento is. Is it mindfulness? Well, it could be, but we aren't really thinking of that when we make the recordings. Is it nature? Not specifically. Is it an experimental podcast? We are definitely not experimenting. Perhaps the ordinary, the everyday, the subtle, the long-form, is just too off the beaten track. We add that Lento is slow growing, but that we do get quite a lot of good feedback. They often say why don't you do a marketing plan? We say we can't really make one because the value of the material is in the the listeners heads not ours. They say you could combine it with someone doing guided meditation. We explain that any talking at all would ruin Lento. And they ask how do people know how to listen to it? And we say they just have to work it out for themselves. And they don't say anything. And we stare at each other.  And after a few moments of thought they say your pod sounds amazing. And we ask if they have listened to it? And they say they will. And we explain it's harder than it seems to capture real authentic quiet, properly, because the places we can get to are almost always scattered with human made noise but when we do practice patience, quiet does eventually come, and that really makes each recording. And they seem to be thinking about it, but not know what to say next. And then we talk about something else. And we hope they might try listening, in a quiet place of course, with a pair of headphones or ear pods, so they can hear the captured quiet properly.  In this special edition to mark four years we retrace our steps through six 10 minute segments from these episodes:  17 Dusk in the Forest of Dean  26 Delicate sifting waves at Felixstowe Ferry  139 A passing storm from the attic of an old house 128 Persistent rain at night in an urban garden  192 Spring wildlife on the Hoo Peninsula, Kent  136 Ocean breakers near St Abbs on the east coast of Scotland  Listen to each episode in full via our blog. Our grateful thanks to everyone who listens and supports Lento.  

In late December 2020 we were given permission to make a long form landscape recording of Abney Park nature reserve in north east London. Abney Park is an area of long established woodland, surrounded by busy streets and major roads carrying traffic in and out of central London. It's an oasis of tranquility used by locals to escape from urban living, that very convincingly does look like deep rural woodland. Muddy paths between tall trees, with the advantage if you take the right routes, to never see the city beyond. To the ear though, the city is usually very much there and present. All around. And from above. Planes heading to London's airports pass almost directly overhead, often separated by only a minute or so. Sirens circling. Helicopters hovering too. Wondering along the muddy paths and admiring the specimen trees can require some considerable zoning out of the aural experience, depending on the action of the day and weather conditions.  What we've found though, by going back through our archive, is this recording. It is one we made on Christmas Day, in between lockdowns and when air travel was substantially reduced. The sounds of the city are of course still present, but greatly softened. The wind can be heard murmurating through the trees. The birds form the primary sound sources. Their crisp songs echo, and reverberate through the empty woodland. It's a unique soundscape, that is unlikely to happen again.  You can of course still witness periods of tranquility within Abney Park. We do every time we go. And there are times in this recording when the presence of human activity approaches that which is normal now. What is we think different, and demonstrated in this piece of captured quiet, is just how long the peace lasts. And just how delicate the wide panoramic sound of the city rumble is, compared to today.  We'd like to think this recording might serve as a benchmark for future city designers. and for everyone to listen to, as an example of what north east London can, and did sound like, with human made noise re-balanced with the natural world. 

Nothe Fort in Weymouth, on the Dorset coast. An old sea fort that celebrated its 150th birthday in 2022. For most of these years, it has been able to stand, looking out to the sea around Portland, amidst pristine clear night silence.   Against the velvety quiet, tidal water ebbs and flows, rises and falls, swells and recedes, softly, around semi-submerged rocks. It's water that has a slow motion, sleepy  sound. It's a soundscape that will have been heard by many a night watchman. And perhaps also the odd  soul, curious enough to be awake at this time.  But did the sea sound the same here 150 years ago as it does now? It isn't possible to say. We can't ask the people who knew. The sea, the rocks, the currents do change over long spans of time. So perhaps they did hear something slightly different, back then. Or maybe not. What we can hear in this recording, that we made by leaving the Lento box overnight in a tree beside Nothe Fort, capturing and witnessing the night hours, is from April 2023. We hope to get back to Nothe Fort before too long, to explore the museum again, and make another overnight recording that future generations will be able to listen to, and compare, with how it sounds to them, in 150 years time. 

Everything sounds different in the night. Close things sound sharper. More precise. That which is farther away, sounds larger, though it is still farther away. The sound image of the night, is curiously paradoxical. And yet in an evolutionary way, it is the night context where our hearing may have fundamentally developed to fulfill its primary role. Here we're back for a second time, amidst the upland trees that surround this hidden dell, to take in this captured quiet from the night. To really listen to the sense of atmosphere that exists when nobody is about. The rilling water, however subtle and unnoticeable during the day, fills the scene. Amplified by the heightened reflectivity of the leaves above. It's about two o'clock in the morning. Almost all the sheep on the surrounding pastures are silent. Floating, like tiny clouds, just above the pitch dark ground.  From time to time, the sky opens up with the sound of a passing plane. Nocturnal flights that for us make this place edgeland. The effect is to light up the full width of the landscape. Reveal, temporarily the vastness of the land. Its plunging contours. Its luscious fields. Its gritstone walls. Ancient barns. Sleeping farmhouses. All at rest, under an empty, windless sky.  For a daytime listen from this place, go to episode 207.